


Interpersonal skills

by AnnMore



Category: The Man in the High Castle (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-10-28 03:09:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10822479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnMore/pseuds/AnnMore
Summary: Juliana Crain is to be sent to spy on her former comrades in the resistance: she is a double agent of Obergruppenführer John Smith under his personal tutelage.Obergruppenführer finds it's time she perfected her interpersonal skills.





	1. Chapter 1

„Tell me how you‘d go about it,” he said, his voice low and gruff.  
Her stomach sank, but she immediately pleated her facial muscles to reassume the habitual expression of a submissive Asian female – a second skin she had grown in the Pacific States to survive. She had found it served her well here, too.  
She never knew what he’d require. He’d watch her from his chair, the ankle of one leg on the knee of the other, an oddly frivolous and relaxed pose given how much in control he was, of himself, of the surroundings, of her. Sometimes he wouldn’t there, but he’d watch her via hidden cameras or in recording. She assumed he did. Every single waking moment she would be aware of being enveloped in the cocoon of his undivided attention. There were days she felt she didn’t exist but in his mind, as a figment of his imagination, a construed identity, a Juliana Crain, a turncoat to be send back to spy on her former comrades in the resistance, or a woman learning useful skills to the greater glory of the Reich: drop messages inconspicuously at unexpected places, shade someone unnoticed, shake off a tail herself, yield guns; sew, embroider, mend clothes, cook healthy Aryan meals, heed racial hygiene in her whereabouts. The latter was taken care of for her. Her days were monotonous, minutely scheduled, ephemeral. She survived Helen Smith’s saccharine tea parties and the Smiths’ family dinners, at odds by the glimpses of humanity from a man who routinely set her primal fear centra alight. Obergruppenführer John Smith, family man, father, friend.  


Once in a while she’d be summoned to his cabinet for an assessment. He’d read out routine questions and go over her progress in a monotonous bored voice which she would swear had a mocking edge to it, were she actually able to gauge his moods and motives. He’d regard her with the earnest of a bureaucrat while she’d try to ignore the tiniest wrinkles of mirth at the corners of his mouth and eyes.  


…”You are doing very, Juliana.“ John Smith crossed his cabinet; he walked slowly, hands in pockets, with a slight showy bounce; yet each step seemed to have finality and purpose far beyond the ramifications of their simple meeting. Suddenly, he was sat on the edge of the bureau right next to her looking down to her with a solemn intensity she could not bear very well at the moment. Dreadfully handsome, that’s how Lucy called him, she remembered. A voice screamed in her, she meant it literally, literally, you little fool, don’t blink now. She looked up into his eyes for what felt like eternity, the compassionate green eyes of a large animal of prey, the beautifully sculpted face – a landscape of shadows.  
“Thank you, sir,” she managed.  
He kept a pause scrutinizing her, as if to ascertain himself that she was the same person still that had entered the room; much did he know she had to ascertain herself of the same thing every time she’d leave it.  
“Interpersonal skills,” he said abruptly, turning away to fetch a thin file from the bureau. ‘A next, logical chapter in your…schooling.” The pout on the thin lips was unmistakably ironic this time. Her gaze dove down to re-join his again in an instant: her wide-eyed innocent sincerity against his wide-eyed undisguised mirth. “You shouldn’t experience any problems with that, Miss…Mills. I dare say you are already…quite proficient, are you not?”  
“I’d bet on anything you could fool anyone within a matter of minutes, Juliana.”  
She furiously fought against blinking, and blinked all the same.  
“Very well!” Smith exclaimed. “People who lie think – mistakenly – that blinking gives them away. No! Blinking is natural,” he smiled at her warmly, his eyes still wide-open. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember him blink once throughout their conversation.  
She smoothed the fabric of her dress that suddenly needed her immediate attention. How much does he know, she thought feverishly; what can he know when you yourself don’t know much beyond the truth and destiny, and he doesn’t need that?..  
“What are we going to do, sir?”  
“I believe we are already doing it, or we have just started, Miss Mills…Juliana…Jules.”  
Her stomach churned over and fell abruptly, and she asked, brushing her hair out of her face and blinking exactly twice:  
“You mean, sir?”  
“I mean to ask you to imagine certain scenarios and think of your – own – responses to them. Based on your own experience.”  
She could only hear “Jules” in her head, in his very own, hoarse and yet oh so smooth, timbre.  
“Imagine you are to… retrieve an important document from the inside pocket of, say, a man who trusts you wholeheartedly.  
“Tell me how you’d go about it.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am finding that I can only produce short chapters at a time, so that's how it will go. Ironically, I hate short chapters in fanfiction myself. Ha.

“Well, it would seem rather simple to do then. If the man trusts me wholeheartedly, that is,” she even pretended she found the question funny. _Do they have Frank, how can it be possible, it’s impossible; Jules?_ Her brain burst out in a scream she had been holding in for a while, but she couldn’t afford ruse in her head now.  
The man cocked his head with what looked like a genuine curiosity.  
“Oh is it? How so?”  
“I’d just choose an intimate moment.”  
His head shot up abruptly; watching the tell-tale rise of an expressive eyebrow, she realised she had been foolish, that her mind, pre-occupied with Frank, had walked her into some sort of a trap.  
“So the men who trust you tend to be intimate with you?”  
“You said I had to think of what I _would_ do…in fictional scenarios.” She defended herself weakly. As abruptly as he had come down, he stood up to leave her side, tall and dark and immaculate; he felt an irrational urge to keep him by her and to convince him. _Of what?_ “No, of course, there are friends who trust me…Men and women.” Sweat droplets were gathering on her back followed by a constricting wave of heat – she was getting hot under her collar, wasn’t she, she was half expecting Smith to point this out in crisp terms – all she wanted was to take off her thin gabardine jacket she wore over a light summer dress Lucy gave her, but she already felt utterly exposed. Then it hit her, she tried to breath in and out, but she had a freakish feeling that her lungs refused to inhale air altogether...  
“Only, of course, they don’t trust me anymore.” _Or they are dead. All dead._ When she audibly gasped at the words she didn’t say out loud, strong hands pulled her up by her arms and held firmly. By then she was swallowing in enormous amounts of salty fluid that otherwise threatened to break the barriers of her eyelids; she squeezed them shut so that she didn’t make a complete idiot of…Only she already had.  
“But you do trust them, don’t you, Juliana?”  
“What?.. No, no…! Not after what happened…” she shook her head, was it another trap? When she looked up, she saw that concern had gathered in the deep frown between the dark eyes which, too, were concerned yet cool.  
“So isn’t it the crux of the matter, Juliana?” He spoke to her quietly yet forcefully, giving her arms slight squeezes and shakes to have her full attention. “That’s what we will learn – gain trust from people who don’t trust us and whom we don’t trust to get what we need. And we make use of every opportunity and every weakness they reveal us. I will teach you and you will learn. Right now.”  
She nodded along without actually listening or even hearing, and then, like in a dream, she was pulled against his chest, and his left arm embraced her shoulders. Dumbfounded, she found herself suddenly panicking about her recent heavy perspiration that might be repulsive to him before anything else came to her mind, before registering his own scent – distinctly male with a touch of eau de cologne, sandal wood of some kind – and his feel – solid, firm, warm and… soft. The fabric of the uniform she had expected to be rough – something she only realised the moment itself – turned out to be comforting to touch and actually soothe her skin. It was wool of the highest quality possible. But of course, those uniforms of austere, dreadful beauty were made comfortable to wear around the clock for men of power…who didn’t smell of sweat or blood and didn’t carry around the stench of terror after all, as she also subconsciously had feared. They smelt of sandalwood and…normality?.. She was never allowed to think this through, though as she was rubbed and patted on her back in a final act of reassurance which of course it was and asked in an appropriately gentle rumble ‘You are ok now?’. And the fore of her jacket was patted reassuringly, pulled back into fashion, her collar smoothed properly as if she were a schoolgirl on her first school day.  
He smiled briefly - she was found appropriate, she almost smiled back – and turned his back to her. Still feeling slightly numb, she saw him re-emerge before her, the two forefingers of his right hand pointing up with something held between them. After long seconds of staring, it finally dawned upon her. Her identity card, her new most-cherished, invaluable Reich-approved identity card on the name of Miss Julia Mills, racial purity status A.  
She had been pickpocketed.  
The expression on her face must have pleased him greatly; the dance of amusement in his eyes was unbearably compelling to watch, against all odds. And she watched, her insides weightless mist, as he handed the card back to her with words:  
“Remember, Miss Mills. Every opportunity, every weakness. Surprise, distraction.”  


She wanted to laugh.


	3. Chapter 3

“You do know it was just a demonstration, Juliana, an illustration to my words, if you like. After all, what I said was in itself quite trivial, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t dream of wasting our time on trivialities.”  
_Yes, I’m just counting my blessings. _Obviously, she didn’t respond with anything of the kind to his half-apology that still somehow ended in an insult to her intelligence. She overcame the instinctive urge to check the contents of her pockets, natural in anyone freshly pickpocketed, or button herself up – that would have been ridiculous given the circumstances. Instead she did what seemed appropriate in the circumstances given: smiled meekly, straightened up in the chair reassuming the posture of a regardful and guileless woman, disinclined to take offence.__  
“Of course, I understand it, sir.”  
“Right! Let’s turn to non-trivial matters then.”  
Unsurely, she nodded. Smith had returned to measured pacing before her, hands folded on the low of his back, as if he were to give her a proper lecture. The fierce interchange of light and shadows on the high cheekbones and ascetic hollows under them, narrowing down to enclose a finely carved mouth, kept her unwillingly fascinated. His question caught her doubly unprepared when it came.  
“Miss Mills, what is your relationship to fashion?”  
“My relationship to fashion?” she repeated in a louder voice, shifting on the chair. “Non-existent, I guess.” She nearly laughed. It was as much as _the_ topic her life now turned around though – in the circles she now frequented. “I hadn’t had much of an opportunity in the Pacific States to…” She gestured away helplessly.  
His eyes raked along her frame rather cursorily, but she felt it so much the more, as prior to that he had made every effort to look exclusively straight into her eyes – which was admittedly as unnerving.  
“And what about this charming little dress you are wearing? Quite exquisite and expensive, if I’m not mistaken?”  
He had her heavily blushing right away. She was not even sure if the provenance of the dress was more embarrassing than the fact that it really was a ‘charming little dress’, a quality item she had never owned before, and that she loved it how pretty it made her look.  
“It’s a present. Lucy…Lucy was so kind to …to buy it, to help me…with new garderobe…” she mumbled and hastily complied when he motioned her to stand up and come forward to him. Maybe she had crossed a line or made herself look cheap by accepting an expensive gift?...His gaze travelled thoughtfully over the visible part of the garment, and with a vague sense of dread her hands reached for the flaps of the jacket. ‘No, leave it on”, he warned curtly, putting one hand up. Upon seeing her jerk away and swallow nervously, he gave her a calm reassuring glance and said with an emphasis: “You don’t have to be afraid. Not of me. Not here.” She exhaled almost imperceptibly – the air she didn’t know she was holding in. _Not of me? Not here? _The two statements were in conflict in a vaguely menacing manner she couldn’t quite put her finger on.__  
“Lucy’s certainly got an impeccable taste,” His eyes were dancing with humour she didn’t feel she could share. “How’s she doing? You’re getting along rather well, you gang?” he asked. _Was it his idea of small talk?_  
“Well, yes…” Still ill at ease, she watched Ubergruppenfuhrer walk past her and around, but didn’t dare to move without an order. Instead, she babbled away. “She’s having a baby! Lucy and her husband have been trying for a baby for…some time, and now -” Somewhere behind her back he gave a deep rumbling chuckle. “Oh Lucy. Who’d have thought. An impeccable taste _and_ impeccable judgement.” Her back stiffened as she stilled a jerk her head was about to make, contemplating the fleeting insinuation.  
“Don’t mind me, please. My interest in fashion is purely functional, I’m afraid.”  
“As for clothing, I’m mostly compelled to learn whether it hides something interesting, and if yes, where.”  
At this she couldn’t help but jerk her neck in his direction so abruptly that it audibly cracked.  
“Now Juliana,” he said reproachfully, his voice full of laughter. “Don’t get distracted. Remember what we’ve been discussing. Where do people keep stuff they want to hide? ”  
“For example, take your shoes.” And he made his way around her to align his feet – toe to toe – with said shoes. She looked down at her threadbare, faded-blue ballerinas that she secretly loved and that still were embarrassingly mismatched to her dress. And all the more to his black leather boots she was sure were quite luxurious in their own way – there couldn’t have been more contrast. She curled up her toes.  
“They clearly don’t have double soles. And, although they seem solid enough to have carried you around for an unholy amount of time,” the warmth in his chuckle shocked her. “I take that the only interesting thing they hide – are your painted toe-nails.”  
Blood rushed into her cheeks. “My nails are not...painted.”she stammered, brushing her hair our her face as it prickled too much, shot a glance at him – and couldn’t take the amount of thrilling, sparkling hilarity in his eyes.  
“Ok, ok, ” he hushed, dropping his voice a whole notch. Its innate hoarseness made the way he pronounced some combinations of sounds crackle and break at the back of his throat, so that it often resembled a guttural growl – as menacing as he wanted. But now, at its lowest, it was a soothing drawled-out rumble, coming out of his chest and resonating in hers.  
“And I’m afraid that your dress isn’t so interesting either, as lovely as it is. It’s too revealing.” He laughed breathlessly at her sudden jumpiness. “Juliana. It has a very simple design, no shoulder pads, no… enhancements on the inside,” he added delicately. “I’ve seen it before. I sometimes accompany my wife on her shopping trips,” he explained, humorousness seeping through. “She asks my advice. Unfortunately.”  
With the index finger of his right hand he drew a line along the seam of her dress, feather-light, barely touching.  
“A simple silhouette. Plain. Close-fitting. No. It is not a dress to be used for hiding… anything,” he murmured.  
Through the hair curtain she readily let hang down before her face, she finally glanced up. Her breath hitched even without any indication in his face that he meant anything beyond the matter of their conversation. His half-lidded eyes were focused on his own index finger, slowly travelling higher along the seam with the slightest of pressure. His long, thick, silky eyelashes struck her as improbably luscious, whereas the rest of his countenance was so summarily dashing.  
“But with you, Juliana, I don’t know. You are very good…Your design is simple and ingenious…” She had an eerie feeling that his hoarse murmur was being born somewhere inside her, making her insides warm and tingly and the skin feverishly cold - as if she were partaking in his examination of herself in a sort of an out-of-body experience.  
The fingers halted to point to the left side of her chest, hovering, ghosting. “Juliana. What are hiding here?”   
Anticipation – she recognized it in a prickliness of her lips, utterly shocked and out of breath.  
“And here?” The fingers danced over her forehead. And then, sudden and sharp – there was the sensation of his large hand cupping her face, the fingers pressing into her temple, and the thumb – just under her chin. He drew her closer, hard, her ear to his mouth:  
“Am I to believe that you are a Jeanne d’Arc? That you had a dapper Joe Blake comfortably wrapped around your little finger with this angelic smile of yours? Promises of glory? A _purpose_? Yes?” His whisper was warm and urgent. “Not even a taste? Are you telling me he didn’t pant after your sweet little cunt?” The shock at the obscenity left her dizzy, lost in the low crackle of his voice. “Didn’t he get to fuck you gloriously, the good boy that he is, the handsome one?” She gasped and fought - against his voice, his hands, the heady sensation of falling in her belly - as if being pulled down by an accelerating force of gravity. “No!” She shouted. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t sleep with Joe Blake! We didn’t sleep together!”  
“Are you sure, Juliana?” He took hold of her jacket, pulled it open, smoothed it out absent-mindedly and fiddled with the flaps, well out of the way of her heavily heaving chest. “Do you still have that flimsy little dress on you used to wear before, prettier than this one?”  
“What? Yes,” she mumbled.  
Then he simply let go of her.  
“Miss Mills,” he said and produced her identity card out of his own pocket. His eyes and gestures were cold and businesslike. “Here's your document. You seem to part with it easily."  
"You may go now.”  
She was looking down at her hands.  
“What was this?” she asked.  
He paused. “A reminder. Remember: surprise, distraction. We've covered the basics, I believe. For the practical part, you will have instructors and exercises. For, say, extraction of documents and the like. ”  
He swung around on the heel and returned to the bureau to write something down in a register. Looking up, he casually remarked:  
“I assume you do remember that my wife has invited to dinner this weekend?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to establish a timeline in my story. I guess, it's still before Juliana reaches out for the Resistance in the Nazi Reich and just after John learns about Thomas' illness. Before anything of consequence has taken place. I want them still undefined by important events. I cannot guarantee I will keep to the timeline of the series.

She didn’t hear from him for the following three weeks.  
The week of their momentous conversation was especially hard for her. First of all, she did start the promised practicum in the matter that Standartgruppenfuhrer had benignly called ‘document extraction’ and that boiled down to technically advanced pickpocketing and hacking with the approval of the state. The instructor – a tiny grey man – was sad, knowing, relentless. The nimbleness exercises he gave her were developing into a constant need to move her fingers, which drove her mad. Schemes of all kinds of strongboxes were popping up before eyes when she lay in bed widely awake at night. And there was impatience slithering in her, frustration coiling in her insides. She needed to see _him_ , to make clear with a face-saving semblance of credibility, that whatever happened in the meeting, didn’t eat its way under her skin – only then the tight coil wounded up in her mind would snap and release her. At night, it was worse. At night, her body remembered only the intensity and direction of what plagued her mind at the daytime. She felt the coil wound around her limbs and heat up, flooding with warmth the insides of her thighs; the obscenities he said would flash back into her memory as slaps in the face, and she would writhe on her bed in the dark, pressing the flushing cheeks into the pillow – shamefully imagining sandalwood scent ingrained in the black woollen fabric, and how deliciously, rhythmically it would rub against bare skin; in a dream, she’d disrobe for him, slowly, her submissive mask on, his hooded gaze trained on her – nothing but intense concentration under the soft silk lashes.  
When Helen Smith told her at the dinner table that weekend that _John_ had already been away for a week, she felt disappointed beyond reasonable expectation. She went through motions, sidestepping for every other invitee with her carefully chosen casual attire and fitting manners. Lucy, whose behaviour, beside her usual skittishness, had taken on a dreamy quality, was easy to pass by; she had also learned to outmanoeuvre the seemingly random yet pointed double-entendres from the doctor’s wife. Most of the time, she half-heartedly tried to unravel the mystery that was Helen Smith. She was scared of what she might discover. Cheerful, blue-eyed, immaculately dressed housewife, whose mellow figure balanced on the edge of puffiness and who she was certain was hard as steel underneath. Who had him and, more importantly, who ‘knew what she had.’ Did John Smith know what he had in her? And what exactly was that? She had observed a comfortable, deep bond between the two, far beyond marital routine on the one hand, and mere attraction and sex on the other. Far enough to be past it? Their interaction in her presence was affectionate, but devoid of underlying sensuality. Or was it an act they put on in public? Was there an act John Smith put on to please his wife? She felt guilty and sick thinking about this; it was the sweet sickness of picking open a crusted gash, over and over. It was what she was compelled to think of when poking her fork into Hellen’s cherry pie of the colour of run blood.  
‘How is your exam going, Julia?’ Helen asked in her sing-song voice when Juliana volunteered to help with cleaning up the kitchen afterwards.  
‘Fine, fine,’ she answered evasively, hoping for the issue to blow over as it had happened a couple of times.  
‘Thomas is there to help you, aren’t you, Thomas, sweetheart?’  
‘Yes, mom,’ said the boy whom, sitting by the window with a book, everyone had forgotten.  
‘No, no - ’ Juliana started, only to be interrupted by Helen: ‘Thomas can sit with you next Tuesday and Thursday after he comes back from school.’  
‘But Mom, I have my Hitlerjugend meetings then!’  
‘Don’t you think that helping someone is more important than that? And I will talk to your leader, he won’t mind if you skip a couple of meetings, don’t worry.’ It was clear that the issue had been settled well beforehand and not worth discussing about.  
'Yes, of course.' The boy obliged, his deep sense of duty being invoked and fulfilled – and it made him happy. She felt a pang in her heart at the sight of that. The mystery that was Thomas Smith.  
Over the course of the following week she found she liked the boy. He had a gentle, finely-lined face of his mother and a dark complexion, resembling his father’s. Thomas was open, friendly and patient with her when she struggled with convoluted aspects of racial theory and practice. His uncompromising devotion to the Idea, the rules and principles scared her, but at the same time it made her realize how, instead of crippling his will like she had thought, it gave him a clear and unwavering sense of purpose. It was what enthused his sickly, lithe body. Actually, she suspected that Thomas harboured even more willpower and determination than his parents ever gave him credit for. She realized at last that he resembled his father more than she had ever expected him to, maybe more than his father realized himself. He was intelligent, consistent and headstrong. He turned out to have an understated sense of humour which had thrown her off a couple of times before she finally accepted its existence. They laughed and giggled like two schoolchildren preparing their schoolwork together, which they were. He even had long, thick dark lashes.

He might have been standing at the door much longer than those couple of seconds she kept staring at the pout-lipped face after she had noticed him – she couldn’t tell anyway, swaying up and down on her chair, and giggling. The chair fell on the floor with a thud and she froze, her feet still on the footrest below. The surprise on the boy’s face in front of her turned into joy at the sight of the father. Just why did her chest ache again?  
‘Dad! I didn’t know you were home!’  
‘Well, I am, son. Nice to see you, miss Mills.’ The familiar throaty rumble with a tinge of warmth, surely directed at Thomas, and only by association at her.  
‘Obergruppenführer,’ she nodded, trying to decipher the curious curve of his smile. The greenish cardigan over a white shirt, a tie and a pair of simple dark trousers, the attire she was also familiar with, and yet unable to get used to – on him, leisure wear looked like a disguise, while the predatory elegance of a uniform was a natural fit. At least in her eyes, but maybe she was wrong, maybe domestic cosiness was just as natural to him as anybody else, and it was her whose retina was stained with him in relentless black-and-white, and ruined.  
Thomas succinctly covered their progress, clearly at pains to ‘correct’ the impression their giggling might have left on his father. She lowered her feet to the ground, uncomfortably aware of Smith’s mock serious frown – he was playing along. Was she supposed to get up and…  
‘No, no, you go on with your work, I won’t interfere.’ Smith turned to go, hands in pockets. She felt deflated. But then he looked back, raised a finger and pointed it at Thomas with a humorous reproach:  
‘Oh, yes, Thomas. I happen to know your mother has asked you something. And we both know that if you mother asked something –‘  
‘Oh, that’s true!’ The boy jumped up, red-faced. ‘I had totally forgotten. You know, Julia and I were just in the middle of an important definition…’  
‘Easy. Never leave a lady in the middle of an important…definition. Finish up first.’  
The boy blushed and murmured: ‘Yes, sir.’ She kept her expression carefully non-descript. From under her lashes she observed him retreat, his firm, broad-shouldered back, his slow, measured walk. While listening to Thomas with half an ear, she tried to clear her mind, and failed.  
Not a minute later, she caught a movement behind the window out of the corner of the eye. When she turned her head, John Smith simply stepped into her field of vision. She could see him perfectly, since it was a window wall. There was a patio with garden table and a couple of chairs outside. Unhurriedly, he installed himself in one of them, his back to the window, and lit a cigarette.  
Her head was empty. Was he going to watch them? To signal his presence? _It is his home and his patio. He has every right to have a smoke on his patio. Why right now? Why not?_  
She nodded and asked the necessary questions; Thomas’ methodical manner started to irritate her. Smith’s neatly trimmed, short-haired back of the head barely moved – what moved up and down, was his hand with the cigarette.  
‘It’s ok, I think I understood it, Thomas. Go, your dad is waiting,’ she whispered.  
‘No, he’s just smoking. He likes to smoke there,’ Thomas replied. He also whispered.  
Nevertheless, he stood up and went to the window – to knock at it and take a leave from his father, she thought. A window pane glided smoothly into the adjoining one. She realized it was a sliding glass door; she hadn’t seen such a thing yet, in contrast to Nippon-style paper panels she was accustomed to.  
‘Bye, dad. You’re staying, right?’  
‘You bet. Are you sure Miss Mills knows everything she needs to know?’  
‘Dad!’ She was unsure what Thomas was so indignant to have doubted - his teaching or her learning capacities. Both, probably.  
‘Ok, go! Yes, I will bring Julia back home.’ The boy blushed at his inner wishes being so transparent to his father. And she felt an already familiar sting in her chest. Thomas, she whispered to herself. _Be safe._  
‘Bye, Thomas! Thank you! See you!’ she waved at him. The boy smiled happily, waved back and left through the patio without returning to the room. His father watched him leave and kept looking in that direction. The glass door was open. She remained seated at the work table, both hand palms on the surface.  
Then, of course, she went outside.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't expect I could make so much out of 'pickpocketing;'
> 
> Comments appreciated:)

The patio was a cosy sunlit island, surrounded by a sea of cheerfully bright, luscious grass. It felt surreal to step onto it out of the window – but, of course, it was no more surreal than her daily life; the moment she parted from the known reality to step into another was already behind her. One of her futures lay in the hands of the man in front of her. What if he treats it like the cigarette he was now kneading between his gracious, slender fingers – takes a few greedy pulls to throw it away in the end?  
A shadow of deep thought on his face was brushed aside to greet her. He was coolly courteous as usual, and as usual, a slight ironic curving of his lips warned against taking anything he said too literally.  
‘Glad you decided to join me, Juliana.’ He patted on a chair next to him. Instinctively, she took another one at the opposite side of the table, but now she was glad to be able to look into the house.  
‘My son is quite gushy about you.’ He offered her a cigarette, which she refused.  
‘He is a very nice, lovely boy.’ She didn’t have to force her arm to sound sincere, and it felt liberating.  
‘He can surely charm girls, I see!’  
He was obviously joking this time, and still she blushed and hurried to add:  
‘Well, he absolutely can. He showed me photos, and there is this girl…Judy…She might be rather charmed already.’ Then it dawned upon her that it wasn’t a particularly brilliant move on her part to be spilling the beans about a teenage boy’s romantic life to his father, even without the annoying complication of the father being a high-ranked Nazi officer.  
There was a glimmer in his eyes, slightly squinted to avoid the cigarette smoke.  
‘He hasn’t told you about that, hasn’t he?’ She quietly asked.  
‘Maybe not.’ He lay his chin on the knuckles of his right hand, planting the elbow of that arm on the table, then splayed his fingers over his mouth. His bright eyes insistently searched her face, his skin tightening over the skulls.  
‘You do like Thomas, don’t you, Juliana.’ It was a statement.  
‘Yes, of course, yes. You can be proud of him.’ She also wanted to add that it was easy to like Thomas and that was not so fragile as he seemed, but somehow she felt that it wasn’t what Smith was after, that whatever reaction he wanted from her, she had already provided it. Ą strange, comfortable intimacy she never thought possible stretched between them, and she decided to use it as an opening.  
‘So…What happens now?’  
‘Yes?’ He murmured, still studying her.  
‘I’ve been told my training is coming to an end. So I wondered…’  
There was a pause, while he savoured a prolonged inhalation and let the smoke leave through his nostrils.  
‘I’ve read the reports. You’ve been consistently good. I have no complaints.’  
She almost huffed.  
Whatever common ground they had was slipping as he was folding back onto himself; he further widened the distance by leaning back and throwing the ankle of one long, elegant leg on the knee of the other. It still striked her as frivolous - for a boring family man he was now presenting as.  
‘I wondered what I am heading for now. Is it almost over? When?..’ It was a scary word for her to pronounce, and to await his reaction to it was as scary. But the stiffening of his features when he looked away revealed her nothing.  
‘Juliana, at this moment of time –‘ he paused, as if he needed to reflect on what exactly it encompassed, ‘all I can tell you is to keep doing what you’ve been doing so well so far, improving and perfectioning yourself.‘  
The opening was closing, and she felt being moved back to the position asigned to her in his world – a pion.  
‘I am not sure I’m getting any good at what _you_ wanted me to learn’, she blurted.  
‘And that is?’ His eyes sparked up again, but it was another kind of spark entirely.  
‘Well, last time.’ With a stare, she dared him to deny the reality of their last meeting. He didn’t, he only sighed a little laugh.  
‘Did I say it could be taught? Or that you needed to be taught, for that matter? I don’t think so. It was – a reminder. I wanted –‘  
‘I think you just wanted to mess with me.’ She said harshly, surprising herself, but with a sense of relief. ‘To tease me, to play with me. To intimidate me.’  
‘So which one?’ With a sway of his right arm behind the backrest, he ascertained he was treating this a little ‘scene’ on her part and was now prepared to enjoy it comfortably.  
She brushed the irritatingly clingy strands of hair out of her eyes.  
‘All of this.’  
‘And just why would I do that to you, Juliana?’ His words slurred lazily and stumbled over edgy consonants, and what she heard was a mocking drawl.  
'Because you can.’ The answer came immediately.  
He laughed out loud.  
‘OK’, he said, straighening himself up. ‘Let’s make it quits. Do you think you could find something interesting…here?’ And he rised his hands tot he sides, putting himself on display.  
‘What?’ She regarded him suspiciously.  
‘Come one, Juliana. I’m offering you a requital.’  
‘I don’t want to get back at you. Why would I do that?’  
‘Because you can.’


End file.
